


El Corazón Wants What It Wants

by blithers



Category: Romancing the Stone (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reality Show, F/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:29:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8883898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: Sixteen contestants, eight weeks in the Colombian jungle, and a final prize of a million dollars on the line.  Welcome to El Corazón!





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ghostcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostcat/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Ghostcat!
> 
> Many thanks to my amazing beta reader, innie.

Joan’s sister had the worst ideas: marrying Eduardo, still being married to him when Eduardo had ended up mysteriously stabbed to death, the whole fleeing the country deal that had resulted, and only being able to return after her name was cleared, that sort of thing. And yet Joan was pretty sure that, despite the Lifetime movie that was Elaine’s life, this was _still_ the worst idea Elaine had ever had.

“It’s a knock-off of _Survivor_ ,” Elaine said, and set the application packet down in front of Joan. “Sixteen contestants, eight weeks, with a treasure hunting, _Indiana Jones_ -type theme. Gloria would _die_ if you did this. The timing is perfect: you just finished your last book -"

“ _Wild Heart of Texas_ ,” Joan said. “You’re going to cry your eyes out, Elaine.”

“- and the publicity would be amazing for your career. And what are you going to do if you don’t do this, anyway? Have intense conversations with your cat, drink sad airplane alcohol? I know you take a break between novels, Joanie.”

“I take a break to _re-charge_. I read, I sleep, I walk the city, I plan my next book.”

“Sure, whatever. All I’m saying is re-charge in Colombia with fifteen of your closest friends, a camera crew, and a million dollars on the line.”

“Colombia?”

“The country where they’re filming.”

“Colombia.” Joan snorted. “Of course.”

“I could help with your video application, help you get everything together.”

It was true - Joan wouldn’t have a clue what to do for something like that. She could barely keep her own Twitter account and publisher-created blog up and running without occasional but intense technical help.

Elaine leaned in closer, scenting blood in the water. “I’ll help you with _all_ of your application. And you probably wouldn’t even make it on the show anyway - who knows how many applicants they’ll get? But it’ll be fun to just apply. We could do it together.”

The application packet said _El Corazón_ in a calligraphic font across the title page. There was a black and white outline of a gem next to the words, in a round brilliant cut, like a diamond or an emerald.

“What does _el corazón_ mean?” Joan asked.

“It’s the name of the show. It also means _heart_ in Spanish. Appropriate for a romance author, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Joan said, and ran her fingers over the words.

“Talk to Gloria,” Elaine said, sitting back. “And just think about it, okay?”

***

“No way,” Gloria said, precise and glamorous in gold jewelry and a pencil skirt that fit like a second skin. “You, in Colombia? You can barely make it down 82nd Street to my office some days. You would end up dead, with some jungle creature eating you after you accidentally took the wrong path and stepped off a waterfall.”

“I’m not going to _die_ by _waterfall_ ,” Joan said, unexpectedly stung. “Or end up eaten by _any_ jungle creature. I’m sure the show wouldn’t let that happen, for liability reasons, if nothing else. Besides, you’re always telling me I should get out more. Live a little, take a risk on life.”

“Yeah, as in, go on a date, Joan. With a stockbroker or some douchebag VC, where the worst thing that’s going to happen is he gets a little too handsy in the cab ride home before you have to dump his ass on the curb and tell him you never want to see his date rape-y face again.”

“I’m not talking about finding a guy. I’m talking about going to Colombia as part of a reality TV show.”

“Heaven knows why.”

Joan wasn’t quite sure why she was seriously thinking about this crazy idea either. “Elaine thinks this would be good for my career.”

“I can’t deny that. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Gloria poured herself a second gin and tonic from the side bar. “Why do you want to do this? You’ve never given a second thought to any of the crazy suggestions Elaine has come up with before.”

“I… don’t know,” Joan said slowly. “There’s basically no chance I’ll be picked, so why not try?”

“Are you thinking of moving out of historicals? Is this something to kick off a transition to contemporary romances? You know I’ve always said that you should diversify your brand. We could even do a pen name for the contemporaries, something to…”

“You know I couldn’t abandon Angelina and Jessie like that.”

“Dear, sweet, handsome Jessie,” Gloria murmured. “That lantern-jawed lug of a man.”

“There are no men like Jessie these days.”

“Bullshit. There are plenty of alpha heroes in contemporary romance. You make Jessie a dashing young CEO, Angelina into a scrappy woman in her small town fighting for the library that’s about to close down or whatever instead of her father’s ranch, and away you go.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Darling, all I’m saying is there are a lot of risks you can take in life. Are you sure you want some déclassé reality show to be the one you take?”

***

_Three Months Later_

“I’ve decided that I don’t like riding in the back of pickup trucks,” Joan yelled, holding tight onto her floppy beach hat as the open-air trunk she was sitting in the back of with three other contestants bounced its way through the rutted jungle roads. The brim of her hat flapped madly around her head, like a small bird trying to fight its way to freedom.

The short, balding man next to her - Ralph, she thought his name was - glanced over at her long enough to dismiss her. A producer sitting in the back of the truck with the contestants shot her a sharp look and put a finger over his lips. There was supposed to be no talking while in transit to the _El Corazón_ set, since the show wasn’t technically filming yet.

It had been a long couple of weeks between the arrival of the acceptance packet at her apartment and yesterday’s flight to Colombia: boarding her dear cat Romeo with Gloria, wringing the very serious promise out of Gloria that she would not kill Romeo in Joan’s absence, packing up the rest of her small life in New York, pre-writing the posts for the upcoming blog tour for the release of _Wild Heart of Texas_ , and the mandatory and extensive physicals, vaccinations, and psychological examinations required to participate in a reality TV show.

“They want to know how to get under your skin,” Elaine had pointed out, and Joan had wondered, wildly and for the millionth time, what she was getting herself into.

The truck slowed to a jarring crawl through a particularly deep river stream and pulled around a sharp turn, and there, in front of them, was a cleared field with a couple of pre-fab trailers parked in a cluster, a circle with wooden benches and what looked like a giant fire pit cleared out, an obstacle course made out of brightly painted 2x4s, and, over to the side, a large production sign that read _El Corazón_.

Joan and the fifteen other contestants were hustled out to a colored mat, and waited silently while a camera crew sprang into existence around them.

Finally, a man with a bright blue cargo shirt stepped out in front of them, flashed a toothy smile, and proclaimed, “Welcome to _El Corazón_!”

Everybody clapped politely. The boom mic suspended above their heads wobbled as the sound man adjusted the equipment to scratch his nose.

“My name is Mark Sutten, and I’ll be your host for the next two months. _El Corazón_ is a treasure hunt designed to test you, both mentally and physically. You’ll be surviving in the jungle while proving your worth in a series of challenges, fighting for clues to discover the end goal of the game: a priceless gem known only by the name _El Corazón_ , worth our ultimate prize of a million dollars!”

There was some scattered but more enthusiastic clapping from the crowd of contestants.

“You’ll be competing in a series of sixteen different challenges over the course of the next eight weeks. Some challenges are part of the treasure hunt, and will win you clues to the location of the gem, along with rewards to help you survive in the Colombian jungle as you search. And some are elimination challenges; come in last twice and you’ll be kicked off the show. This isn’t _Survivor_ \- there won’t be a vote to save you. The law of the jungle is eat or be eaten, and hunting for priceless treasures is a ruthless profession.

“You’ll be paired off for this treasure hunt. Everybody will share their camp with one other person, in eight teams of two. You can decide to work together or not: pairs that discover the gem working together will receive a million dollars in total, to be split between the two. If a lone person in a camp is the one to discover the gem, they’ll claim the million dollar reward by themselves. It’s up to you how you choose to play.

“We’re going to do a schoolyard pick now to determine our teams, with the picking order determined randomly.”

Mark picked up a bag from a table and shook it, and it rattled with what sounded like heavy pieces of ceramic. He stuck a hand inside and pulled out a rounded tile, painted with one of the contestant’s names.

“First up,” he announced, “Zolo.”

An oily-looking man with a thick black moustache stepped forward, and picked one of the stronger looking men as his partner. They ran through five other pairs - Ralph, the short guy from the truck, picked a tall, skinny man named Ira, who was apparently his actual cousin in real life - until Mark called her name, and Joan stepped forward.

There were three people left on the mat who hadn’t been chosen yet: two men and a woman in an _El Corazón_ -branded bikini. One of the men looked a bit like the hero on the cover of some bad 80s romance novel, with an impatient expression, feathery shoulder-length hair, and a long-sleeved shirt and khakis, while the other man was bald, wearing shorts and a Mets t-shirt with cutoff sleeves.

She might as well go with the person who was covered up the most: there was less chance of sunburn. The lady in the bikini and the guy in cutoff sleeves were out, so 80s romance hero guy it was.

“Jack,” she said, reading the name tag on his chest.

Jack stepped forward to stand next to her, and the remaining couple partnered off, creating the eighth team. Joan snuck a glance over at Jack while the production crew rearranged them for the next shot, wondering just what sort of person she’d picked to live with for the next eight weeks. He, for the most part, stalwartly ignored her.

“Here are the maps to each of your camps for the next two months,” Mark said, handing out pieces of waterproof canvas with landmark-based maps printed on them. “We’ll have our first challenge in two days, for both treasure-hunting clues and survival gear for your stay in the jungle. See you back here then, teams!”

Joan started off through the Colombian jungle with a stranger at her side and a two-man camera crew following a couple of steps behind.

***

Their camp, when they finally found the location on the map with the occasional discreet help of the camera men, was a small clearing in the trees with a pair of cast iron pots (one for food and one for drinking water), a hatchet, a flint for making fire, a burlap sack of rice, and a smaller bag of dry beans, all helpfully marked with a yellow flag.

There was also an envelope with the supplies, which Jack handed to her to open while he scoped out the surrounding area. The envelope contained two things: the first, a list of show rules reiterating most of what Mark had told them earlier, and second, a torn scrap of cloth, with a couple words written on it: _leche de madre_.

“Mother’s milk,” Jack translated after Joan sounded the words out, poking around with a stick at the ground nearby for no reason Joan could tell.

“Is that a clue?”

“Must be.”

“Do you think everybody else got a clue at their camps?”

Jack grunted. He was a real conversational type, Joan was discovering.

“I wonder if other people got the same clue as us or different ones,” Joan said, staring at the words a little harder, trying to read the intention behind them. Mother’s milk? She had no idea what that could possibly mean.

“We’re not going to care so much about that if we don’t have shelter soon,” Jack said, and grabbed the hatchet to wander off into the woods.

Joan looked around, trying to imagine this small clearing as the place she’d be calling home for the next two months, then started looking for downed wood in the surrounding jungle.

***

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack said to her, returning some time later and dragging what looked like several whole bamboo tree trunks behind him.

Joan threw another branch of some sort of - plant or tree thing - on top of the mishmash of sticks and vine that she was currently and optimistically calling _home sweet home_ and straightened up.

“I happen to know a bit about building lean-tos and… and such, actually.” He sized her up, head to toe, then shifted his skeptical gaze back to the shelter Joan was building. “I did research for my book _Wild Heart of Texas_ about…”

“Have you ever actually built a lean-to, lady? In real life, and not in romance-novel land, or whatever it is you do?” They’d all done a round of introductions earlier for the camera; the little Joan could remember Jack saying was that he did something having to do with exotic birds, whatever that meant.

Joan breathed in sharply through her nose, remembering that there was a camera trained on her, despite this Neanderthal who thought it was okay to call her "lady" even though she still had her name tag on. “It’s academic knowledge, I admit, but the principles should be sound.”

“Let me guess. You read the Wikipedia page for outdoor survival?”

“I try to pull from a wide variety of sources for my books,” she said with great dignity.

“So, that’s a yes on Wikipedia.”

“A very partial, infinitesimal yes!”

“A partial yes is still a yes.”

She looked over and caught sight of one of the cameramen - Brian, she thought his name was - aiming his camera at her, and swallowed her next response, stomping off through the woods instead. Brian followed her at a distance, filming her awkward trek through the thick jungle.

She found a couple of wide pond fronds with thick, rubbery leaves about ten minutes away from their impromptu camp, and whacked them down at the base using a handy nearby rock. The violence felt satisfying.

“Go on a fun vacation,” she muttered, and slapped at a mosquito trying to get fresh with her underneath the sleeve of her shirt. “See Colombia! Be on a reality TV show! It’ll be great for your career. My ass. Gloria was right.”

When she got back, Jack was sitting with his back against a tree, using the hatchet to saw some of the wood Joan had dragged into camp into even lengths.

“We’re going to loft it,” he said, without an apology or a preamble or _anything_. “Build an elevated floor, so we’re not lying on the ground when the rains come, and to get us away from the bugs.”

Joan slapped at another bite on the back of her neck, and dropped the palm fronds in the center of camp.

“Those’ll work well for the roof,” Jack said, nodding at her feet. “Get us more of those.”

“What am I, your slave?”

Jack muttered something Joan couldn’t quite make out under his breath.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” Jack gestured at the palm fronds. “Get more of those or don’t. But I’d suggest more, and before it starts raining.”

***

The next few days were the hardest of Joan’s life.

The rain was inconsistent but often heavy, the mud was unrelenting, the Colombian jungle was teeming with bug and plant and animal life that was on a personal vendetta to eat as much of any person dumb enough to be caught in it as possible, and two days later Jack and Joan came in at the bottom of the pack of the first reward challenge, leaving them without either any additional hint of where the gem they were supposed to be looking for might be or one of the tarps that several of the teams had won in addition to clues.

Nights were the hardest. Joan shivered her way through the first night when the shelter they were building was still in a sad, half-done state. The second night was a little better, since they’d both woven palm fronds all day to finish the roof, but was still a cold, unrelenting punishment.

During the second night, when Joan’s teeth were chattering with the chill, Jack heaved a heavy, dramatic, sigh, rolled closer, and wrapped an arm around her waist to pull Joan back into him.

Joan froze in place. Even her teeth had stopped chattering in surprise. Jack was tight against her back, and she could feel the heat of his body through their clothes. He tangled his legs up with hers, and their calves rubbed together.

“You’re freezing, I’m freezing,” Jack had muttered, under his breath. “It makes sense. We’ll move the fire closer to the shelter tomorrow.”

It _was_ better, but it had been years since Joan had slept next to anybody, simply _slept_ , and she kept jolting awake any time Jack shifted against her back, but eventually the heat and bone-deep exhaustion and simple comfort of not being alone had won out and Joan had fallen asleep.

***

The next day, all the kind feelings Joan might have been harboring toward Jack for helping her sleep through the night disappeared when she noticed Jack eyeing her paperback edition of _Passion’s Lonely Lie_ the next day, along with their dying fire. Each contestant was allowed a single personal item to bring with them on the show, and Joan had chosen to bring her first book to make it on the bestseller list as a reminder that she could do anything she set her mind to. Joan had wrapped the book tightly in leaves and kept it stored under the lean-to to keep dry since that first day.

“My book!” She grabbed it back from Jack and jammed it underneath the inadequate protection of the branded t-shirt all the women had been given to wear and hunched protectively over it, trying to keep the book dry until she could re-wrap it. “Don’t you dare, Jack Colton. Don’t you _dare_.”

“Jesus, what’s so important about that damn book anyway?”

“It’s…“ She faltered. “What did you bring for your personal item?”

He turned away, going back to stacking wood. “I don’t have to tell you.”

“Fine. _Fine_. Then I don’t need to tell you why I picked this book, and you are _not_ going to use it to start our fire.”

“Fine by me,” he drawled, and an angry heat crept up the back of Joan’s neck. “I just wanted to keep us dry and maybe a little warmer tonight, and heaven forbid we don’t use the brick of tinder you just happened to bring along to help us.”

“We are not going to _burn_ my _book_ ,” Joan said, and left before she could say anything she might really regret.

***

“So, it’s been a week now. How are you holding up? And, more importantly, what do you think of Jack?” Elizabeth, the production assistant, sat next to the cameraman, smiling at Joan like a shark with the barest mask of civility. Joan could hear the whirr of the lens as it zoomed in on her face. They filmed one-on-one confessionals for the show daily, and were coached with a ruthless efficiency Joan found alternately distasteful and fascinating.

“He’s…” She frowned, and tried again. “Jack is… a character.”

“A character,” Elizabeth repeated.

Joan nodded, more firmly. “A character.”

“Like in one of your books?”

“Something like that.”

Elizabeth leaned forward. “You know, we’re not going to tell Jack what you say in these confessionals. This time is for you and you only. You can be honest with me.”

“You and the ten million people watching at home?”

Elizabeth’s grin flashed again, there and gone, disconcerting in its sharp, predatory briefness. “Exactly. We’re all friends here.”

Elaine had told her that these shows loved drama, right?

“He’s a jerk,” Joan said flatly. “Jack T. Colton is a misogynistic, grade A, capital-J _jerk_.”

“Ooh,” Elizabeth said, leaning back again. “So not exactly one of the heroes of your romance novels?”

She would _eat_ her book before describing Jack as a hero in any way, shape, or form. “Not exactly.”

***

The next week went by painfully slow. Without any additional clues, they hiked the surrounding countryside during the day looking for landmarks that might indicate where the gem was hidden and gathered what they could to eat and make the campsite more liveable, and at night they slept pressed together, trying to conserve what warmth they could.

They still bickered most of the time, but the fighting slowly lost some of its edge as exhaustion, hunger, and the sheer reality of being the only two people they could rely on sank in.

News from the production staff arrived via a ridiculous mail system where one of the camera crew put a message in a little wicker basket that had been nailed to a tree, and then filmed Jack and Joan pretending to find it and read the note out loud. They got a message with the time for the second reward challenge a couple days after the first elimination challenge, so Jack and Joan trekked into what they’d both started calling base camp the next day. The ever-changing obstacle course next to the production trailers had been changed to resemble a high ropes course, with ropes dangling between tall wooden platforms.

“Welcome!” Mark boomed. “Today’s challenge is a twist on an old Tarzan favorite. You’ll be walking across rickety wooden logs and bridges, swinging on vines across chasms to escape capture, and moving from platform to platform high among the tree-tops. The winner of today’s challenge gets a clue reward with a special twist. Ready to play?”

All the contestants were fitted with climbing harnesses and helmets, and then walked through the stations step-by-step by the producers. Tokens were drawn to determine the order of the teams through the course. Jack and Joan drew the first slot, with Zolo and his partner behind them.

“Zolo gives me the creeps,” Joan whispered, as the staff re-checked their harnesses and carabiners.

Jack spared Zolo a glance. “Moustaches don’t do it for you?”

“He looks like a cartoon villain who ties women to railroad tracks.”

Jack laughed, short and sharp, and they were called up to the first station.

Joan and Jack had chosen to go across the wooden plank obstacle one at a time, to give each person the best chance of not falling off and having to restart. Joan went first, walking with her arms held out, and Jack hustled across after she’d finished. They both made it to the opposite platform on the first try with the swinging ropes, and made it down off the course in record time after that.

“And our winners for the second reward challenge are Jack and Joan.” Mark announced. “They each win an individual clue for the location of _El Corazón_ ; please, both of you, step forward.”

There were two clay urns in front of Mark, each one freshly painted with a design aesthetic Joan could only describe as sloppy and vaguely jungle-ish.

“You’ll each pick an urn, with a clue inside. Whether you share those clues with the other person or not is up to you.”

“Ladies first,” Jack said, gesturing, and Joan stepped forward

Joan opened up the urn on the right, and pulled out a single piece of paper. Jack pulled out a similar piece of paper from the second urn, and frowned down at it for a moment before stuffing it in his pocket. Joan looked down at her own paper then, and noted with some surprise that it appeared to be a map, a large map with the words _El Corazón_ at the top and what looked like a river cutting through a third of white space. She quickly followed Jack’s lead, hiding it away to look at more closely later.

***

She pulled out the map later that day, on her way to grab water with one of the cast iron pots from a small nearby stream. The map was yellowing - probably artificially treated to look older than it was - and had several pictures inked on it. A mother and her child were in one corner, with the words from their first clue, _leche de madre_ , next to the drawing, and there was a large, black picture of a dancing devil holding a pitchfork with the words _tenedor del diablo_ next to it. Joan wasn’t sure what the translation of that might be, although she had a reasonable guess what the word _diablo_ meant.

She sat and stared at it a while longer, but couldn’t make out anything else from the map. She refolded it and went to fetch the water she’d set out for.

She continued to pull out the map whenever she was alone in the next week, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The geography matched nothing she could think of in the surrounding area, and it was hard to get away from Jack since they were joined together at the hip for so many things. They did well in the next elimination challenge, but one couple - the woman and man with the Mets t-shirt who had been the last to be chosen - were eliminated from the game, bringing the number of teams down to seven for the first time.

***

“Hey,” Jack said, nudging her with his foot, “you wanna play hooky?”

“Hooky?”

“Get away from here for a while, get away from this camp. Come on,” Jack said, and there was a hint of the charm he flashed around so generously when all of the contestants were together, but rarely bothered to aim at her. “You know you want to, Joan.”

Joan noticed then what Jack must have seen: they were alone right now, a rare occurrence that happened only occasionally as the two camera shifts changed over or their regular crews got called up to cover other, more urgent events. Their camp was rigged with permanent cameras, of course, creepy nanny cams installed in the trees, but those cameras couldn’t follow them if they left the camp. There were a couple of night-vision cameras aimed in the general direction of their shelter as well. Joan stared at the single lens installed inside the lean-to sometimes, trusting in the decency clause in the contract she had signed as she changed clothes as quickly as she could in the darkness.

“Where would we go?” she ask. “You do remember we’re surrounded by jungle on all sides, right?”

“I found something interesting a while ago,” Jack said. “Been meaning to show it to you. Besides, I’m tired of these damn cameras everywhere, following us no matter what we do.”

“Okay,” she agreed after a moment’s thought, feeling daring. “What’s the worst that could happen? Let’s do it.”

They tromped through the jungle for a while, and Joan was just starting to doubt Jack’s invisible compass, this expedition, and her entire life that had somehow led her to this point when they broke through to a small clearing and Jack pointed to a small downed cargo plane about twenty feet away, vines crawling up the rusted fuselage and broken windows.

“How cool!” she said, running a hand over one of the wings. “How did you find this?”

“Luck,” Jack said with a grin. “Pure luck. You want a boost?”

Jack hoisted her up by the arch of her foot, and Joan found herself in a cargo hold littered with broken boxes, spilling what looked like moldy magazines and other packaging, and the dirt of the jungle creeping in.

“Reminds me of _Lost_ ,” she said, brushing off her shorts as she looked around. “Or a movie set.”

Jack sprawled backwards on some scattered pallet boards. “Never did get around to seeing _Lost_.”

“Do you think this is part of the show?” Joan poked her head into the cockpit, and opened a couple of the little hidey-holes there. “Some sort of landmark or set the show set up, on the way to finding the gem?” She couldn’t think of anything on her treasure map that reminded her of a downed plane, but…

Jack laced his fingers behind his head and stretched back, crossing his boots at the ankles, so his legs looked sinewy and long. “Don’t know. Doesn’t seem like it, though - this plane seems like it’s been here a long time, waiting for us.”

“Maybe not the show. Maybe somebody who flew planes just liked to get high in more ways than one,” Joan said, unearthing a ziplock bag which smelled suspiciously like pot from the highest compartment at the back of the cockpit, and waved it in Jack’s direction. “I can’t imagine that this is something they’d plant for us to find.”

“Hey now,” Jack said, starting to grin.

***

The sun set outside the plane, the sky darkening into a heavy blackness, and they’d both agreed they wouldn’t head back for the cold comfort of their camp tonight. The freedom without cameras around was intoxicating, a respite from unblinking supervision and the mental awareness of being constantly watched. Joan wiggled her bare toes, and watched them move in the flickering light.

They’d debated the fire, Joan arguing that it would make them easier to find, knowing that the _El Corazón_ staff was probably searching high and low for them as they sat here. But Jack had found a cardboard pack of bar matches in the same vicinity as the marijuana, miraculously dry, and the night had started to sink into a damp chill around them. Simple human comfort won out in the end.

They passed the untidy joint they’d managed to roll back and forth between them companionably, sitting shoulder to shoulder against one of the wooden pallets.

“Why are you being nice to me?” she asked, leaning her head back. “I mean, today, and now, and - you know, always. What’s up with that?”

Jack laughed, low in his throat. He sounded _great_.

“When am I not nice to you?”

Joan snorted. The pot had made her loose, pleasantly dizzy. “Always.”

“I don’t think I’m mean to you.” Jack rubbed at a spot on his check, looking wry. “Although I guess I can’t say I’m particularly pleasant either.”

“Hmmph,” Joan said, staring down at her hands. There were cuts in various stages of healing along her palms, and dirt practically embedded in the skin. A bruise blossomed like a sickly flower on the inside of her right wrist.

“Why are you doing this?” Jack asked, staring up at the roof of the plane’s cargo hold. “This show, I mean. Putting up with all this, with me. You don’t seem the type.”

Joan rolled her head about. “Oh really?”

“Yes really.”

“I’m on an _adventure_ ,” Joan drawled, lingering on the word and rounding it out, and Jack’s gaze shifted back to her.

“All of life’s an adventure. You don’t need some shitty reality TV show to give you that.”

Joan shrugged. “Maybe.”

Jack looked like he wanted to say something else, to argue with her, maybe, but all he said was, “Huh.”

“Anyway, what about you? You don’t seem like the reality TV show type either.”

“I’m in it for the money, lady, plain and simple.”

“Nice one, Han Solo. What does a guy like you need with a million dollars anyway?”

“Who doesn’t need a million dollars?”

“Money isn’t everything, you know. Money can’t buy happiness. Or love,” Joan said, a bit dreamily.

Jack rolled his eyes. “Money is nothing when you have it and everything when you don’t. I got dreams, you know. I have things I want to be doing in this world.”

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

Jack hesitated, then pulled out a folded-up, glossy sheet of paper and handed it to her. It must be Jack’s personal item allowed by the show, and somehow he'd kept it dry all this time. Joan unfolded it, carefully: it was a single-page advertisement torn out of a magazine showing a sailboat in full mast, a Caribbean, aqua blue sea frothing around the bow, wood gleaming on the sides and the white of the sails clean and bright.

“I”m going to buy a boat,” Jack said. “Sail the world. Be my own man. That’s what I need the money for.”

“She’s beautiful,” Joan said sincerely.

She refolded the ad along the well-worn crease lines and handed it back. The firelight flickered around them, casting shadows on the metal walls and catching the dimpled steel riveting.

“What about you?” he asked. “You got a plan for the money?”

It was funny; Joan hadn’t really been thinking about the prize money at all. She didn’t think she’d really win the game, for one, and she lived a comfortable life as it was. She had Romeo, her apartment, and a job she loved that paid her bills and supported her comfortably. Her life was the way it should be, and the idea of an extra million or half a million fit uncomfortably into the image she had of her stable, happy, cozy little life.

“I don’t know. Donate most of it to charity, I guess? Save the rest, invest it?”

Jack’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead.

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds like a real adventure.”

The fire crackled in front of them, bright and warm, and Joan couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so good.

“We should win this thing,” she said, and rested her spinning head on Jack’s shoulder, leaning into his warmth like she’d been doing every night for the past three or so weeks. Jack wrapped his arm around her waist and she breathed groggily into his shirt. “We should actually do this, Jack.”

“I thought that was always the plan.”

“You know what I mean,” Joan said, sleepily. “Like, actually try to win this. _Win_ this win this.”

If Jack said something after that, Joan didn’t hear it.

***

Joan woke up the next morning with her head on Jack’s chest, his arm wrapped around her shoulders, and a camera pointed directly at their faces.

“Busted,” said Brian.

***

They were hustled back to the main gathering area, straight into one of the reward challenges that Joan had forgotten was today.

“Looks like we found the runaways,” Mark drawled in his game-show-announcer voice, and Joan gritted her teeth and tried to shake off the vague feeling of a hangover she had. Several of the other pairings shot them jealous, hotly curious looks.

They ran the day’s obstacle course, set up to resemble a _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ set-piece complete with a rolling boulder and a knock-off weight-swapping challenge to steal the goal object, and it was only Jack's pulling her out of the way of one of the plywood trapdoors that had kept the two of them in the game. Another pair was eliminated from the game, Ralph and his cousin Ira won the reward clue from the challenge, and then both she and Jack were quickly separated and hustled into separate confessionals.

“Sooooooo,” said Elizabeth, leaning forward hungrily. “Tell me what happened with you and Jack last night.”

“Nothing,” Joan said. There was no way she could cop to getting high on national television, but the rest of the story was pretty innocent. “We decided to go on a walk, and Jack had found this wrecked plane at some point, so he took me there to show it to me. We were trying to figure out if it was part of the show or not, if maybe it was a clue.”

“And then you decided to stay there.”

“Sure.”

“All night.”

“Right.”

“Together.”

“As you said.”

“And alone.”

“It was cold and night was falling. We didn’t want to get lost, or be without shelter when it got dark.”

“Right.” There was a world of insinuation in the word, and Joan started to realize, with a sinking suspicion, exactly how this was going to be edited on the show.

***

They were silent on the walk back to camp, trailed by Brian-the-camera-guy and Santiago-the-sound-guy like guards escorting prisoners back to their cell. They rebuilt the camp fire, which had sputtered out into nothingness during their night away, and went about their regular chores without speaking.

Joan waited until night fell on their camp, both of them staring into the fire as the smoke kept the bugs at bay, before she said, “I have a map to the location of the gem stone.” She heard rather than saw Jack react, and cleared her throat. “It’s hidden in a hollow in a tree, not too far from here. I hadn’t told you yet because…” She faltered. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you.”

“How’d you find it?” Jack asked, neutrally, and Joan relaxed a little at the lack of bite in his voice.

“Do you remember the challenge we did where we both won personal clues? That’s what I won. I can’t make any sense of it, though, but I’m pretty sure it’s a map to the actual gemstone.”

The damp wood in the campfire spit and frothed as it burned, and this time it took longer for Jack to respond. “Why tell me now?”

“I think we have a better chance of finding the gem together,” Joan said, giving voice to the words she'd rehearsed on the long walk back to camp. “I haven’t made any progress on my own, and some of the map is in Spanish.” Then, “I think we’re stronger together than we are apart.”

Jack was silent another minute longer.

“You know they’re going to edit this whole show to make it look like we slept together last night,” he said then.

There was a rising buzzing in Joan’s ears. “I know,” she said. “The two of us slipping the cameras last night, and deciding to work together now. But,” she lifted her chin up, “it doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.”

Jack laughed at that, and his smile flashed bright in the dim campfire light. “Bother me? Hell, lady, I’m not going to complain if people think I was lucky enough to catch the eye of a beautiful woman like yourself.”

Jack was dangerously charming when he cared enough to try, she reminded herself.

“I can’t believe you just tried that line with me when I’m covered in bug bites and I haven’t showered in over a month.”

Jack grinned again, lazy and dangerous. “All your imperfections add to your many charms.”

“Are you flirting with me, Jack T. Colton?” she asked. This whole thing was spinning quickly out of her control.

“Maybe I am. You should tell me if it’s working.”

***

They trekked the next morning to the spot where Joan had hidden the map, where she dug it out from inside the hollowed-out tree branch, wrapped in leaves. They pored over it together for a while, Jack translating the phrases she hadn’t known - “Devil’s fork,” he said, pointing to the picture of what looked like a lopsided cactus being held by a devil, “that was my clue I got at the same time” - but nothing made more sense than it had when Joan had first seen the map.

Joan spent a while doing work back at the campsite after they returned, patching the roof of their elevated palm-frond shelter and weaving extra branches into the leaky spots, while Jack split firewood and set it to dry at the base the tree with the thickest leaves near their camp. Joan settled in for a nap, and when she woke up, Jack was reclined back on the ground, head propped up on a log, again with her the copy of _Passion’s Lonely Lie_ , but this time reading it.

“Hope you don’t mind,” Jack said, waving the book in her direction. “Figured I’d see what all the fuss was about.”

“Not at all,” Joan said, and got to work making their paltry dinner of rice, a handful of beans, and some of the edible insects they’d scrounged up earlier, along with boiling water for drinking.

Jack’s eyebrows started to rise at what looked like a couple chapters in, and Joan thought with some interest that he must be getting close to the first sex scene in the book. She threw in the rice and beans after the water was boiling, adding the small amount of protein they had in the insects. Jack let out a deep breath and set the book aside as the sun started to go down.

“Enjoying it so far?” She served up a gloppy serving of dinner to Jack in one of the concave rocks they’d found at the base of the waterfall that was a mile or two from their camp that served as one of their plates.

“How do you come up this stuff?” he asked, instead.

“Practice. Hard work. Research. Imagination.” She took a bite. “More hard work.”

“Huh,” he said, and applied himself to his dinner for a while. Scraping out the last of their sad meal, he continued, “It’s good. Your book, I mean. Not the food.”

“I knew what you meant. Thanks.”

“It’s hot,” he said, staring at her with a curiously intent sort of expression. “Really hot.”

“Thanks,” she said again, pleased.

“That part imagination or research?”

Joan choked a bit on her sad dinner. “What?”

“You got a boyfriend or something back home, helping you out?”

“ _Not_ that it’s any of your business,” Joan said, “but no, I’m not currently seeing anybody right now.”

“Huh,” he said again.

“ _Huh_ ,” she mimicked.

Jack shifted at that, pulling a bit at the waistline of his pants, and Joan realized, with a sudden, funny shock, that Jack was probably pretty turned on right now. He got erections sometimes when they slept together, morning wood that Joan valiantly and politely ignored to the best of her ability, but this was something entirely different. She was used to the idea that her books turned people on, it was part and parcel of the whole romance novelist’s game, but it was something else to know she was the one responsible for making a grown man, who she lived essentially alone with in the jungle, get an erection while a camera crew filmed their every interaction.

The next morning, when she woke up to the feeling of an erection pressed against her lower back, instead of rolling away like she normally did to give Jack the decency of space and deniability, she pressed back a little closer into him instead and closed her eyes, pretending to sleep a little longer.

***

“The next challenge,” Mark said, “is an obstacle course where you and your partner will work together to navigate a series of mental and physical obstacles.”

“What a shock, I never would have guessed,” Joan muttered under her breath, and Jack laughed, low and quiet, in her ear.

They stopped filming while the crew walked everybody through this week’s obstacle course, making sure they all understood the steps needed to complete the first part of the course, which involved collecting several bags worth of puzzle pieces, and then the final step, which was to assemble the puzzle. They gave the five remaining teams a couple minutes to strategize, then re-setup to start filming again.

“Do you want to know what you’re playing for?” Mark asked, rhetorically, the same as he did every week. “This week you’re playing for a joint clue, to be shared with your partner, and you can discuss that clue while enjoying a hot meal, a shower, and a good night’s sleep at the luxurious Hotel Cartagena in nearby Cartagena, Colombia.”

“Oh my god, a _shower_ ,” Joan breathed, and clutched Jack’s hand hard.

Interestingly, Zolo and his partner, along with Ralph and Ira’s team, didn’t seem especially interested in the reward. Neither team seemed to try, leaving Jack and Joan to blow by the two remaining teams that were legitimately attempting the course.

“Congratulations!” Mark beamed at the end, and handed them an envelope containing a clue in the form of a torn scrap of fabric with a single, English word: _fold_.

***

They were transported to the hotel first by the same pick-up trucks that had brought them into the jungle, then by a smaller town car that picked them up once they were off the rutted jungle roads. Their overnight camera crew - Sam operating the camera and Cathy on sound - managed to fit their equipment in the trunk of the smaller car, and they were off.

The hotel was old world Cartagena, with whitewashed walls and green palms dotting the golden sand of the Caribbean beaches.

“I _love_ it,” she breathed.

“There’s no set filming schedule tonight,” Sam said. “There are a bunch of restaurants nearby if you guys would like to grab a real dinner. We’re just supposed to get footage of you enjoying the town, walking around, eating, that sort of thing, but other than that you two are on your own.”

“First,” Joan said firmly, “showers.”

The hot water in the shower burned in her many cuts and bug bites, and beat against her sunburned shoulders like a drum; Joan was still pretty sure she’d never felt anything so good in her entire life. She shampooed her hair twice, scratching fingernails against her scalp and loosening knotty tangles from the bun she’d worn for the last six weeks. There was a clean outfit laid out on the bed when she was done showering, a white off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and maxi skirt with a embroidered leather belt.

Jack, when she came down to the lobby, was dressed in something other than the ratty button-up and dirt-crusted khakis she’d grown accustomed to, in a clean white shirt and tailored pants. He’d shaved; the show gave male contestants access to razors every couple days or so, so that half the cast didn’t turn into an indistinguishable Where’s Waldo of mountain-man beards, but infrequent shaving meant Jack tended to sport an eternal five o’clock shadow that made him look even more disreputable than the dirty hair he shoved irritably behind his ears all the time.

Sam and Cathy were filming establishing shots of the hotel lobby at the back of the room. Joan saw Cathy nudge Sam with an elbow, and the camera swung around to them.

Jack stood up as she approached the table he was sitting at, and his eyes flickered up and down.

“Hey, stranger,” she said, and took a seat. “Showering suits you.”

“I could say the same.” Jack hesitated, then sat back down next to her before calling the waiter over. “What’ll you have?”

Jack was drinking what looked like a whiskey, some sort of depressingly respectable tough man-drink.

“A grasshopper, please.”

“Courtesy of the show,” he explained, pulling a fistful of Colombian pesos out of his back pocket. Then, “A _grasshopper_?”

“Don’t be jealous you didn’t think of it first.”

“Can’t say that I am.” Leaning back, he looked her over a bit closer. “You know, I’ve never seen you with your hair down.”

That had never occurred to Joan; they’d lived in indecently close proximity for so long, with such a complete and occasionally humiliating lack of privacy, that it seemed suddenly immensely strange that Jack had only ever seen her with her hair pulled back in a knotted tangle at the base of her neck.

Jack smiled at her, with one of those flashes of confidence he was showing more and more lately when they talked. “It looks good.”

Joan didn’t know what to say to that, but thankfully the waiter showed up with her drink and they started poring over the map Joan had brought along and reviewing the small handful of clues they’d been given over the course of the show.

“Leche de madre,” Jack repeated, staring at the words, written ornately on the map next to a drawing of a woman with long, curly hair and a baby, haloes around them like the Madonna and Christ child.

“What about devil’s fork?” Joan asked.

Jack stretched his legs out underneath the table, casually long, and caught his hands behind his head to think. “You know how there’s that funny burned-out looking tree trunk, on the way to the waterfall?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, it’s got three pointy bits.”

Joan rotated the map around to face her. “You’re right,” she said, with growing excitement. “It looks just like this bit here…“ She pointed to the black, lopsided fork that the dancing devil was holding on the map.

“What does _fold_ mean, though? We thought the word was English, but maybe it means something different in Spanish?”

“I don’t think it does. I think fold just means… fold.”

“Well,” she said, “if that tree is the devil’s fork on the map, that’s a starting place, which is more than we’ve had this whole time.”

“I think,” Jack said, grinning at her in that sharp, disarming way again, “we might have just earned ourselves dinner.”

***

They walked into the walled Old City after dinner and down the Plaza de la Trinidad, the city square strung with white lights and a band playing in front of the church. The cobblestones underneath Joan’s feet were warm from the day’s heat, and the evening was just starting to chill the air. The night sky hung suspended above them, a golden, comfortingly man-made tinge to the blackness overhead.

“Want to dance?” Jack asked her, holding a hand out.

“I don’t dance,” she demurred, laughing. “I took swing dance as an elective PE class in college and they only passed me because they didn’t want me to have to make up the credit.”

“All you gotta do is let your feet do the walking and leave the rest to me. C’mon, Joan Wilder, live a little. I thought you were on an adventure.”

Jack pulled her close, his hand warm and large against her waist and Joan, to her surprise, found herself twirling around with abandon, her feet light as she laughed, Jack’s body pressed firmly against her as they danced.

***

Sam and Cathy followed them upstairs after filming them returning to the hotel through the crowded night streets of Cartagena, and both said goodnight as they went to their own rooms, which left Joan and Jack standing alone in the hotel hallway.

“Nightcap?” Jack asked finally, breaking the odd moment of silence between them.

The idea of a couple minutes of freedom, away from the cameras again, was too great to resist.

“Sure,” she said, and it was only after they were both in Jack’s room that they realized he had nothing to drink. Joan laughed, and Jack grinned.

“I’ll get us something from the bar,” Jack said, and was back a few minutes later with two glasses of Scotch on the rocks.

They sipped the drinks while talking about everything and nothing, lazily letting the conversation drift and ebb, and Joan couldn’t even pretend to be surprised when Jack finally set his drink down, leaned over, and kissed her.

She felt like she’d wanted to kiss him for weeks, maybe even since the first day, and his mouth was warm and tasted pleasantly and sharply of alcohol. She let him maneuver her back onto the bed so they could make out with him half on top of her, enjoying the feeling of his body next to hers.

He drew back after a bit, panting. “No condom,” he said. “We don’t have condoms.”

“I have a feeling,” Joan said, rolling over to straddle his hips, rolling down against the erection she could feel there, “that we can work around that.”

***

They trekked the next day out to the burned tree trunk, Joan giddy with a night of good sex and orgasms and being clean and eating real, actual food. It took everything she had not to grab Jack’s face and kiss it stupid, but the ever-present lens of the camera, it turned out, was better than a cold shower for killing the mood.

“Here,” Jack said, when they reached the tree trunk, and Joan pulled out the map.

“It’s got to be the devil’s fork,” she said, turning the map around in her hands like a different angle would make everything clear. “It fits so well. But I don’t understand where the map is telling us to go from here.”

“What about _fold_?” Jack asked.

“Right,” Joan said, slowly. “It’s not written on the map like the other clues are.”

“Maybe that’s a hint about what we do next.”

“Fold,” Joan said. She folded the map up into the square quarters they’d been storing it in, then unfolded it again, squinting at the map a bit. “You know, there are other crease lines on this map. I wonder…”

She pressed the map inward from the edges, and the creases folded vertically, like an accordion. The Madonna and Child picture of the mother and baby compressed, like one of the illusions at the back of Mad magazine, into an image of a waterfall.

“Holy shit,” Jack said quietly, like they could be overheard. “The waterfall.”

Joan was buzzing with everything she was feeling: delight and endorphins and adrenaline and happiness. “I can’t believe we figured it out,” she said, and they grinned at each other.

They hiked over to the waterfall. They’d only ever explored the pool at the base of the waterfall, so they clambered up the side of the falls, following what Jack swore had to be a path but looked suspiciously to Joan like a random clearing of boulders as they climbed up. To their shared surprise, there was a small cave about three-quarters of the way up that they could enter by ducking under a side part of the stream.

The cave was mostly empty inside, except for some pools of water, collecting from the constantly dripping ceiling.

“Mother’s milk,” Joan breathed, pointing at a pool of thick, chalk-white water at the end of the cave.

“Hot damn,” Jack said, and they both started digging in the mud with their hands. They unearthed a ceramic white rabbit, with intense eyes and dressed in clothing like some sort of darkly creepy mirror-universe _Alice in Wonderland_. Jack sat back on his heels, frowning.

“Break it,” Joan said urgently. “In my first book, _Treasures of Lust_ , I hid the treasure inside a statue. Break it, Jack.”

Jack shattered the rabbit on the stone ground on the stage, and a large, shockingly green gem the size of a man’s fist tumbled out. It caught the dim light and reflected it like it was glowing from the inside.

Jack gave a low whistle, picking the ridiculously sized gem up to examine it. “Man, somebody went overboard in the prop department. This thing is huge.”

“You should keep it,” she said quickly, the idea that had been brewing in her brain taking sudden, breathtakingly clear shape.

Jack glanced up at her sharply. “What?”

“The gem,” she said, almost unable to believe what she was saying. “You need it. You’ll never be able to afford that sailboat and actually get it on the ocean without the prize money. I don’t need it, or even want it.”

“We found this gem together,” Jack said, but Joan noticed his hesitation.

“It’s yours,” she said, pressing it into his hands. “Believe me. I don’t need this, but you - it would help you. The finale is in a couple days. You should hold onto the gem until then.”

Jack stared at her strangely, in the darkness, until Brian shuffled his feet behind them and Joan remembered, with a strange shock, that they were being filmed. It was the first time she’d forgotten that fact.

“Okay,” Jack said slowly. “I’ll take it.”

***

The day of the finale, Joan woke up with a sick, heavy dread in her stomach.

She and Jack had rehearsed what they’d do for the last couple days. She knew the cameras had filmed both of them finding the gem stone together, but it seemed like a simple matter to let Jack claim it as his own. Joan went back and forth about the wisdom of giving Jack the sole prize, but she felt like it was the right thing to do - she didn’t need it, didn’t want it, and it would change Jack’s entire life for the better.

They packed up their meager personal belongings on the final day, the gem carefully stowed away in Jack’s bag, and made the hike back to base camp for the last time.

“Welcome to the finale of _El Corazón_!” Mark exclaimed, after they’d been seated around the large campfire that would apparently be the set piece for the ending of the show. “We’re going to discuss what’s been happening, and then we’ll have the final reveal of who, if anybody, has found the treasure. Stay tuned for… _El Corazón_.”

They did a large group discussion, touching many of the topics that had come up at various points over the two months. Juan, a man who Joan hadn’t talked to much over the course of the show, turned out to be a huge fan of her books, and couldn’t believe his luck and disappointment that he was only now realizing that she was _the_ Joan Wilder. Ralph and Ira spent much of the end council fighting over why they didn’t have the stone (Joan assumed much of that would be edited out, to preserve the final surprise of who actually had found the gem) and then, after a momentous pause, Mark asked if anybody had a steal to play.

She and Jack had never won a steal, and Joan hadn’t realized that was something that existed in the game. But Zolo stood up, and Mark explained the rules: that if Zolo could name the person who had the stone, he could steal the gem from that person and win the game. Next to her on the bench, Jack’s muscles tensed.

“Her,” Zolo said, when asked by Mark to name his target, and pointed at Joan. “I think Joan Wilder has the stone.”

Joan stood up, giddy with relief that she’d given the gemstone over now. “I do not,” she said clearly, and sat back down.

“She _lies_ ,” Zolo said, trying to intimidate her by looming over her. She didn't like to think of what he might have done if there were not all these cameras and all these witnesses around.

Asshole or not, he still had to be answered, to set the record straight. “She does not,” Joan said firmly.

“It seems like the person with the stone should share it now,” Mark said, and Jack reached down for his bag.

The stone was immediately the center of attention, with its ridiculous size and odd way of catching any light that it could, sparkling like something in a movie. Jack walked it silently up to Mark and handed it over.

“They both found it!” Zolo spit. “They are lying!”

“Jack found it,” Joan said. “It’s his prize.”

“I couldn’t have done it without Joan,” Jack said, staring directly at her now.

“But you are the one claiming the prize, correct?” Mark asked.

“Yes,” Jack said, his gaze never wavering from Joan.

***

Everything after that was a blur. Everybody on the cast was separated to film their end confessionals and sign final show contracts that did everything from re-iterate the show’s lack of legal liability for any medical issues to, Elizabeth pointed out after the camera had stopped running after Joan’s last one-on-one interview, emphasizing that the cast couldn’t contact each other until the series finale had aired.

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, sounding like she really meant it for the first time all season, “but it’s to prevent spoilers from leaking. There’s a clause that says you can’t discuss anything that happened on the show until that event airs, and there’s also a no-contact clause for all contestants that isn’t lifted until the finale.”

“Oh,” Joan said. The possibility had never occurred to her, that she and Jack wouldn’t be able to see each other until the show had finished airing over the summer.

Elizabeth hesitated, then signaled that the camera should be turned back on.

“Do you think that Jack might be playing you?” she asked, eyes hard but apologetic. “You gave up your half of the million-dollar prize to a man you hardly know. Was that really the right decision to make?”

Joan sat back. “What do you mean?”

“Jack could have been getting on your good side to get clues out of you, to win the prize on his own. Like he ended up doing. And that you let him do it.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Joan said. “I decided to take a chance on someone I trust.”

“You’re about to all be split up for transport out of the set and back home,” Elizabeth said, watching Joan closely. “If you want to say anything to Jack, you have to do it now.”

“Do you… do you have a scrap of paper and a pen I could borrow?”

“Of course.”

Joan scribbled out her phone number quickly, and ran over to Jack, the camera following her movement, pressing the paper into his hands. “Here,” she said. “Take this.”

Jack kissed her then, hard and breathless, and she heard the sound man run up behind them, swinging the boom mic into place.

“You’ll do okay, Joan Wilder,” Jack said. “You just wait and see.”

***

_Five Months Later_

“It’s a masterpiece,” Gloria said, dabbing at her eyes elegantly with a handkerchief, as she set down the last page of the manuscript. “Simply a masterpiece.”

“You think so?” Joan asked.

“Absolutely. The language, and the success of the show, and moving into contemporaries, or at least a different kind of historical - this book has bestseller written all over it.”

 _El Corazón_ had been airing for the last two months, and Joan had been living through the surreal experience of reality-TV fame as a result. She’d always been able to separate out her personal and professional lives before as an romance author with a small online presence, but her and Jack’s relationship had been, not surprisingly, a major storyline of the show, and the interest and fandom that had grown up around the two of them had taken Joan’s world by storm.

Joan had originally sworn she’d never watch the show, but after the pilot had aired both Gloria and Elaine had texted her, telling her she _had_ to watch; she had DVR’ed a re-run of the first episode and watched with a bottle of wine, Romeo in her lap, and the remote in her hand to turn the episode off at any point. Instead, finding out what the other camps had been up to at the same time she and Jack had been building their small, contentious campsite had been fascinating. 

Zolo - a colonel, it had turned out, in the army - had quickly emerged as the early villain, treating the partner he’d been paired with as little more than an underling or henchman while he scoured the jungle for the gem. Ralph and Ira’s contentious and uneven family relationship had been sad and dark and humorous in turn, and the other teams had ranged from being mostly concerned with survival to treasure hunting with varying amounts of zeal and interest.

And then the first one-on-one confessional scene with Jack had popped up - just Jack, sitting on a tree trunk with a single knee propped up, casually capable in the khakis and button-up he’d worn throughout the entire filming. Joan’s heart had stuttered painfully. He hadn’t yet lost the weight they’d both shed over the course of the two months, and he looked indecently good.

“I don’t know who she thinks she is, this Joan Wilder. Apparently she’s an author of some sort? I don’t know what she’s doing out here, but I’m not going to let her bring me down, or keep me from winning this show.”

Joan had almost turned the TV off right there. But the inside scoop of what had been going through Jack’s head over the course of the show, and that promised glimpse of a man she felt she knew to the bones and had, at the same time, hardly known at all, kept her watching with a sort of twisted fascination.

The first time Jack had mentioned being attracted to her in a confessional, in the middle of the third episode, right after they’d been yelling at each other at camp about something or the other that didn’t seem nearly so important in retrospect, caused Joan’s jaw to drop and the internet fandom to explode.

“Woman drives me nuts,” he’d been grousing, brushing at dirt at on his khakis that would never come out again. “But god damn, does she have a sexy voice. Like Lauren Bacall or something. I want to argue with her just to keep her yelling at me with that voice of hers.”

Joan touched her neck self-consciously, alone on her couch at home.

The next day, she’d started writing.

As part of the _El Corazón_ contract she’d signed, she wasn’t legally allowed to write an account about her experiences on the show, but nothing in the contract, as far as Gloria had been able to tell, had explicitly forbidden her from writing a fictionalized version of what had happened. She decided to set this book a couple decades back, remembering how she’d thought Jack had looked a bit like a romance novel hero from the 80s, and stripped away the reality-TV challenge, turning the novel into a straight-up _Indiana Jones_ -esque romp through the jungles of Colombia, sans cell phones and internet access.

As Joan wrote, more episodes continued to air. The producers had visibly become more and more interested in her and Jack’s relationship, along with Zolo’s villainy, Juan’s exuberance and daredevil attitude, and Ralph and Ira’s bickering-cousins act. 

Joan alternately dreaded and looked forward to the episode where she and Jack had won the day away from the show in Cartagena, a bit horrified to think that the cameras might have caught any part of the first (and only, she reminded herself) time that she and Jack had slept together. So much of their life was on display for public consumption that it seemed awful to think that the one thing Joan hoped they might have managed to keep quiet wasn’t as private as she thought.

Granted, everybody assumed she and Jack had slept together the night they’d slipped supervision and gotten high in the smuggler’s plane, as he’d guessed. Elaine had sent her a series of increasingly urgent texts while the episode was airing, ending with an all-caps “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DIDN’T TELL ME. STILL, GET IT, JOAN.” But somehow, that hadn’t bothered Joan so much as the idea of knowing that the real time it had happened might have been filmed in any way.

The finale aired in the early fall, closing out the network’s summer season to resounding success. The internet went crazy at Jack’s final solo claim on the gem, despite the fact that both he and Joan had discovered the emerald together, and editorials were written both defending and condemning the action. She was painted as a naive fool who’d allowed a man to manipulate her through sex; she was defended as a woman who still believed in romance and second chances. The clip of her and Jack’s final kiss went viral on YouTube, along with the intense speculation about the state of their current, post-show relationship.

The finale's airing meant that the no-contact clause of their show contracts had finally expired, but no message arrived.

***

Joan’s phone beeped several weeks later, while she was on the way home from meeting with her publishing firm about the logistics involved in getting _Romancing the Stone_ , her next novel, to the press in a new romance sub-genre.

It was an unknown number, and the message only contained a string of two numbers with decimals. Joan was about to delete the message as spam when she took a second, closer look. She googled the numbers when she got home, and came up with the GPS coordinates to a nearby harbor, about an hour or so up the Pacific coast.

She smiled to herself, texted back a time for the next day, and started packing a bag. The first thing she packed was a copy of the _Romancing the Stone_ manuscript.


End file.
